Shooting a Digital Camera Like a 24-Exposure Roll of Film Is Harder Than It Sounds

Film costs real money per frame now, and that price changes how you work: you meter more carefully, you wait longer, and you think twice before pressing the shutter. A digital camera can imitate a lot of that discipline if you strip away its conveniences, which raises a fair question about what you actually love when you say you love film.

On the North Yorkshire coast, Jason Friend set himself a strict rule: treat a Nikon Zf as though it holds a single 24-exposure roll of ISO 100 black-and-white film. He made it harder by mounting an old Nikkor 28-105mm zoom through a stack of two adapters, Nikon F to Sony E and then Sony E to Nikon Z. He bought that lens along with a Nikon F4 film camera. The setup gives him no autofocus, and he sets the aperture by hand on the lens' ring. He also banned himself from reviewing shots, punching in to check focus, or leaning on in-body stabilization. The first frames at Sandsend go wrong in a way any Zf owner will recognize. With the camera left in aperture priority, the top shutter speed dial does nothing, so every careful adjustment he made with a strong ND filter attached was ignored.

The reason behind the experiment is relatable. The F4 had been sitting at home for about six weeks next to a roll of Fujifilm Neopan Acros 100 II, and the cost of each frame kept him from taking it out. That pushed Friend to ask whether he enjoys film for the process or for the final image, and whether a digital body built to look like a film camera could deliver either one. A few frames in, he admits he has copied the frustrations of film far more successfully than the pleasures. That honest early read helps you weigh how much of film's appeal comes from limits and how much comes from the medium. If you've ever thought about doing a "one-roll" digital day, his false starts show you which constraints actually change your seeing and which ones just get in the way.

The Zf invites this kind of experiment more than most cameras do. Nikon gave its photo/video selector a third position, B&W, so shooting in black and white is a physical choice you make before you raise the camera. It belongs to a broader pull toward slower, more deliberate shooting that keeps growing even as autofocus and burst rates improve. The Fujifilm X100VI sold out for months on the strength of its film simulations and retro handling. Pentax went the other direction and released the Pentax 17, a brand-new half-frame film camera, in 2024. Both point to the same desire: you want the camera to slow you down a little. You can borrow that idea without going as far as Friend did. Cap a walk at a set number of frames, keep the rear screen off until you get home, or pick one prime and stick with it. Any one of those limits forces you to commit to a composition before you shoot, and that habit carries over when the limits are gone.

Later in the day, at Runswick Bay and then Staithes, the challenge shifts from exposure to focus and depth of field. Friend notes that his black-and-white viewfinder preview isn't authentic to film. He still recommends it to anyone learning monochrome, because it shows you directly how colors turn into tones and helps you tighten a composition. As the light drops, he moves to a tripod for a building he could have handheld with stabilization switched on. He also worries openly about front-to-back sharpness on a cluttered working harbor scene, since the zoom-in check he would normally use is off the table. With two frames left and well over 100 GB free on the card, he has to choose between a shot he'd planned and a new composition of the village houses he likes better. He takes the new one, and for the final frame, he considers metering with a phone app before deciding to trust the camera's reading.

Once the roll is done, Friend says he won't be using this combination again. The day mostly showed him how much easier digital cameras make the job, and he notes that with real film, he would have spent longer over each shot and its metering, with print film's exposure latitude as a cushion. He recommends trying the exercise once, but he can't see a reason to treat a digital camera as a film camera every day.

His frames from Sandsend, Runswick Bay, and Staithes turn up in the video as he works through the roll, starting with the three identical exposures from his aperture-priority mix-up.